Word: tylenols
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According to Chris Hatcher, a psychologist at the University of California, San Francisco, the personality of the arsonist or bomber, rather than the mass murderer, may be the most appropriate model for understanding the Tylenol murderer. "Other killers," he says, "have a certain satisfaction in stalking their victims. But this is a much more technically oriented crime; the killer does not perceive as clearly the actual death of his victims." Who gets killed appears to be a matter of indifference. Even gunmen like Charles Whitman, who killed 16 people from his perch in a Texas tower in 1966, have more...
Although the individual may be expressing "global" or unfocused rage, he is far more likely to be obsessed by redressing a grievance. The grievance may be against the drug company, doctors, Tylenol users or even some specific individual. Unlike the Son of Sam, who terrorized New York women in 1976 and 1977, he is not striking out against a particular type of victim, but an impersonal object or institution. According to Dr. Daniel Blazer, associate professor of psychiatry at Duke University School of Medicine, he may be a "disgruntled employee" with a "deep sense of being wronged." Like Mad Bomber...
Psychiatrists argue persuasively that criminals actually hope to be caught, and it has been suggested that the Tylenol plot could unravel in a way that leads to the killer's front door. Says Dr. Donald Greaves, chairman of the psychiatry department at Evanston Hospital: "A significant number of killers secretly seek destruction. They want the recognition and sense of fame they receive from their acts." Yet thus far the killer has left no clues, no letters, no hints, no demands, no hidden pleas for help. "The fact that the crime is both grandiose and anonymous is not a contradiction...
...ruminations get to you. No, the Tylenol case is not quite like the Son of Sam killings or the Mad Bomber or the Atlanta murders, and not only because these latest deaths are more random. There is something about the will involved, the you involved, plucking the particular little pill box that your hand has settled on, then standing politely in a row, ready to pay for your medicine. The trouble with poison is that you take it yourself, even when the murderer has spiked the gum on the envelope or when a Borgia has switched the wine...
...first hearing the story is outrageous, confounding. Do you actually mean to say that some maniac has been filling Tylenol capsules with cyanide? Not that the wretched inventiveness of modern terrorism and science fiction have placed such acts entirely beyond the imagination. But we are not talking here about a bombing in a Bologna railroad station or of the Day of the Triffids. This is American everydaydom, the casual course of events. Alarmed, the mind skates hurriedly to the ifs: If Tylenol, why not aspirin? If drugs, why not food? October is the month for Halloween, after all. The razor...